Editor’s note: This story originally ran on August 23, 2015. Throughout the season, Skyline Sports will archive and reprint stories from the past pertaining to the matchups of the week.
Cooper Kupp cannot stop the battle within his own mind.
He remembers driving back from yet another basketball tournament spent riding the bench as an eighth grader. It made him feel frustrated. He remembers as a teenager his growth stunting and any athletic attention passing him by. It made him feel unworthy. He remembers trying to change the perception of A.C. Davis High School in Yakima, one of Washington’s toughest towns. It made him feel misunderstood.
Kupp remembers having dreams of playing college football once his high school days ended. Offers from the Grizzlies and Bobcats never came. He remembers redshirting behind a trio of NFL receivers his first year at Eastern Washington, doubt lingering if he could ever achieve their level of production.
And now, even as a two-time first-team FCS All-America, the Eastern Washington junior wide receiver still hears the whispers. He’s too slow for the next level. The competition isn’t high enough to transition to the NFL. He’s a product of the prolific EWU offense.
So Kupp just keeps his nose to the grindstone, the voices in his head serving as his motivation as he chases some of the Football Championship Subdivision’s all-time records.
“Cooper has this mindset of the rare breed that thinks the way he does,” Baldwin said. “In his mind, he’s never good enough. I’m not trying to compare him to Michael Jordan but listening to what Jordan or Walter Payton or Jerry Rice talked about, they didn’t think they were great just because they are great. They had the same type of things going on in their head that Cooper has. They have the, ‘I’m small school, small, whatever, I’m too slow, I’m not good enough.’”
Through two years at Eastern Washington, Kupp has certainly proven he’s good enough. And the thought that he has two years left is downright scary for the rest of the Big Sky.
“He’s one of the best players in the country,” Montana State ninth-year head coach Rob Ash said. “He’s made some catches against us and ones that I’ve seen on film that have just been sensational.”
As he enters his junior season, he’s now a captain for the three-time defending Big Sky Conference champion Eagles. He’s a two-time consensus All-America selection and the 2015 preseason Big Sky Offensive MVP. Yet he’s not satisfied.
Kupp
“I break myself down and improve on everything I think I struggled at the year before,” Kupp said in an interview in July. “I’m nowhere close. I’m always working at implementation. The worst thing is to become content or stagnant with your game.
“I have the drive to be perfect. I’m not perfect. I know you will never reach perfection. But I’m striving for it and I know I’ll reach excellence along the way by doing it.”
As he enters his third season in Cheney, the numbers are staggering. Kupp caught a Big Sky-record 21 touchdowns as a freshman. He’s already has accumulated 197 catches and 3,122 yards in his career. He followed up his 93-catch, 1,691-yard, 21-touchdown freshman season with a 104-catch, 1,431-yard, 16-touchdown sophomore campaign. He needs just 72 catches to break Kasey Dunn’s (Idaho 1988-91) Big Sky record for grabs in a career. Averaging 60 catches per year over the next two will help him surpass Jacquay Nunnally’s (Florida A&M, 1997-00) career FCS record of 317 catches. He needs just 1,571 yards to surpass NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice’s (Missouri Valley State) career record of 4,693 yards. He’s just nine touchdown catches away from former Eagle Eric Kimble’s Big Sky record of 46 touchdown catches in a career. And he’s 19 TDs away from David Ball’s (New Hampshire) FCS career record of 58.
His tireless work ethic is not new. It’s a decision Kupp made while he was in junior high. As his family drove back from an AAU basketball tournament in Portland, Kupp’s father Craig told him bluntly what needed to happen.
Craig, a former fifth-round draft pick as a quarterback by the New York Giants, told Kupp that he would have to find fortitude within his heart if he was ever going to make it as a varsity athlete. He told Cooper he’d have to persevere despite his size limitations — he was 5-foot-6 at the time — and use his drive to succeed. Around that time, Kupp and his friends decided to make a statement about the environment around them as well.
Yakima has four high schools: East Valley, West Valley, Eisenhower and A.C. Davis. When Kupp entered high school, he and his group of buddies elected to enroll at A.C. Davis, the high school in the middle of the city. Davis has long been known for its basketball, its rough reputation and not much else.
A study published by the Congressional Quarterly ranked Yakima alongside notoriously dangerous cities like Compton, California and Trenton, New Jersey as among America’s most crime ridden. The recording of 471 violent crimes and 4,684 property crimes were the single highest figures of any city under 100,000 people in the United State. Davis had the reputation as the city’s most violent high school.
“I knew people who had gone to Davis who were good kids but as a community, it was like, ‘Davis is a bunch of gang bangers and if you go there, you are too,’” Kupp said. “Ike (Eisenhower) was the goody two shoes school. So we took the idea that we were going to Davis and turn it all around.”
“We had a goal beyond ourselves to reshape what Davis looked like in Yakima. That was in 2007. We graduated in 2011. This last year, 700 freshman enrolled at Davis and 200 enrolled at Ike. There’s been a change in the community. Davis isn’t what they used to think it was. We are proud of that.”
Former Eastern Washington receivers coach Junior Adams coached at Montana State for four seasons under Mike Kramer before Kramer’s firing in the spring of 2007. Adams landed on his feet at Prosser High, a 2A program in central Washington about an hour from Yakima. Former Bobcat coach Jay Dumas was coaching at Davis High and he’d tell stories to Adams of an undersized, yet precocious wide receiver with a ton of upside. At the time, Kupp was only about 5-foot-6 and 130 pounds.
By 2009, Adams, who’s now entering his second season coaching wide receivers at Boise State, was at EWU. By 2012, he helped Baldwin sign a tall, skinny wideout whose only other offer was from Idaho State.
Kupp joined EWU after a late growth spurt shot him to 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds. He redshirted in 2012. He watched players like Brandon Kaufman, Greg Herd and current EWU wide receivers coach Nicholas Edwards work at a level that earned each one a shot in the NFL.
“Cooper will be the first to tell you that a lot of people didn’t think he was going to play here,” Eastern senior wide receiver Shaq Hill said. “Coach Adams is the one who said he couldn’t play here. That chip will never be off his shoulder.”
During the year he sat out, Kupp worked relentlessly to hone his skills both mentally and physically. The formerly skinny receiver got up to nearly 200 pounds, a physical specimen with excellent route running ability, great hands and a keen ability to catch the ball at its highest point topped by no one in the league. By his first season of action in 2013, Kupp put all doubters to rest. He caught 13 touchdowns in his first nine college games and he shattered Randy Moss’s nearly 20-year-old record for touchdowns in a season by a freshman.
“He’s savvy, he’s smart and he knows how to set you up,” said Southern Utah senior cornerback LeShaun Sims, a preseason All-Big Sky selection. “When the ball is in the air, he’s going to go get it. He’s the hardest matchup in the league, bar none.”
Kupp
This latest off-season, Kupp continued to strive to overcome his feelings of inadequacy. He served as a counselor at the Manning Passing Academy. He participated in a passing camp with Boise State legendary quarterback Kellen Moore. He did individual work with his teammates and on his own.
“That dude’s work ethic is ridiculous,” Hill said. “We came in the same summer and I’ve seen it from the start. It’s a habit with him. He wakes up in the morning and does the same thing every day. He’s always in the film room and he never stops. He continues to build on it and he gets better literally every day.”
Now Kupp is in chasing down records from a few of football’s all-time greatest players. Moss’s freshman record for touchdowns in a season is already in the rearview. He’s already second in Big Sky history in career touchdowns. He owns six FCS records. Jerry Rice seems to be in his sights.
Baldwin has spend most of the last 13 years at Eastern. The eighth-year head coach spent four seasons as the Eagles’ offensive coordinator (2003-2006) before taking a one-season break to be the head coach his alma mater, Central Washington, in 2007.
He’s had a front row seat to see players like Kimble, Aaron Boyce and the trio of All-Americas who came before Kupp. Baldwin is hesitant when giving Kupp too much praise as to not derail the mentality that helped him reach this point. But he thinks Kupp stacks up with any that came before him.
“When someone hasn’t played their last couple of years, you want to be real careful because I want him to not get too ahead of it, but the pace he’s on, he’s as good as I’ve been around,” Baldwin said. “I don’t just mean the statistical pace. The day-to-day off-season stuff, the every day stuff, no one can touch him. I would personally argue that if he keeps it up, will anyone ever touch him that’s ever played at our level? That’s heavy company, I know. You have guys like Randy Moss and Jerry Rice who went on to be Hall of Fame NFL players but I’m just talking about the product from a college football standpoint. The pace he’s on, I don’t know if anyone will touch him.”
Photos courtesy of Eastern Washington Athletics. All Rights Reserved.
